Eden
by Vashagud
Summary: Aeris finds that the worst ghosts of the afterlife have nothing to do with the dead and Sephiroth is there to sow the seeds of dissension. Aeriseph.


The night Sephiroth entered the lifestream, she could feel it everywhere. She felt it from her pinky nails to the roots and ends of her hair, and when she sat up in her bed—which was made of what everything in the lifestream was made of, a gauzy _all too real_ but immaterial magic-the night crackled around her. It could be a rather convincing ghost of the real night when the thoughts of the dead agreed long enough to make something cohesive, and that night the skies shuttered to pitch at once, as her whole house made of life energy and her very last thoughts, crashed around her.

Zack had been standing in her bathroom when it happened, shaving the smooth skin of his cheek with an immaterial carving knife from her immaterial kitchen. He'd never actually had to shave, even when he was living, but she knew he only did it for the motions so she never said anything to him about it. As the remnants of her walls floated around them, she took a floating piece into her hand and looked downwards to where Sephiroth was coming through, wings beating furiously against the current, fingers and legs stretched towards the planet and people he still wanted to belong to him.

There was a bright flare in the night, until it tore apart around him, started to edge into what might've been morning, but was only the whole of her property going up in flames. She put a hand to her stomach, and watched as Zack rushed passed her with her kitchen knife, shaving cream whipping off of his face and into the air as green particles. The knife had also gone from his hand by the time he reached Sephiroth, who stood among the wreckage and light.

She clenched her arms around her stomach harder, as Zack punched his General in the teeth. And it was surprising that the General had actually staggered then, as Zack swallowed and unclenched his own teeth, looked back to where she stood. Sephiroth looked on with a dark face, and Zack rushed back towards her. Quickly, she put her hand up to her bleeding mouth.

That had been a month ago.

"That sonofabitch." He said softly one afternoon, braiding her hair as they sat in one of her favorite grassy landscapes. It was where she spent most of her time now, because no matter how hard she willed it her house wouldn't come back. Everyone else's had. Zack's fingers were deep in her hair when he said it again, but his voice shook. He had cared for his General, once.

"Zack, you're pulling too hard." She said, easing back so that he'd have more slack with the braid he was starting. His hand lowered down to her back and she could feel his knuckles circling.

"I fuckin' hate this place sometimes." He whispered, and she bowed her head. As his hand went to venture lower, some unseen force moved her across the grass and away from him. They had tried many times before and were always unsuccessful. Once he'd actually gotten to the last button on her dress, only to end up chasing her naked body through one of the lush forests nearby.

To the day she can't remember that even happening, but he swears it did. Zack sighed.

"And your house is the only one that hasn't rebuilt itself." He said, looking off into the distance. "Why?"

"I don't know." She said. She missed her bed, her pink duvet and the smell of Zack's aftershave. He'd imagined up a lot of things for his own existence. Sleeping on the grass got old very fast no matter how partial she was to anything living and green. The lifestream refused to let her even enter Zack's house. Or any man's house for that matter. "I just hope that all the dead can agree on what the weather will be tomorrow. I'm hoping for a summer day." She said, just as a snowflake fell and melted on her nose.

Zack smiled.

"Someone out there wants snow. Think it's Cloud?"

"Cloud is still alive Zack." She said, smiling. Zack's smile fell.

"He just hasn't realized it yet, I guess." And when Aeris put her arms around Zack the lifestream didn't stop her, but snow began to fall in the middle of her spring day. She guessed more of them wanted something cold instead, something less like Sephiroth's fire.

She felt her winter coat come around her like new soft skin, and later watched Zack trek back in the snow towards his house.

She was surprised to find that she was actually cold that night, even as she sat underneath a massive willow tree, the foliage bidden down to press towards the ground. She still felt the cold, and after the second attempt at sleep, she pulled herself up and tried to will her house into existence. It wouldn't come back.

No matter what she did, it didn't come back. Flustered, she buried her pink, frost bitten face into her scarf. It was too cold to cry, but not too cold scream and so she screamed into her scarf, wondering how her rotten luck had followed her into the afterlife.

She would do everything she'd done over and over again, but that still didn't mean she didn't wonder what it would've been like to have some semblance of a normal life. There was nothing normal about the strange flowers she had back home, the voices she'd had in her head, about the details of her death, and now that was all she strove to have, something normal.

She was twenty two, a virgin, and very dead, and so the very moment she'd dreamt up the first piece of furniture—a plain refrigerator—for her house, she had put her face against it and cried. She was finally going to have something simple, and then Sephiroth, _again_-

She bristled at the thought of her lost refrigerator, knew it was a selfish, materialistic thought, but didn't really care as the snow started to come down harder around her. Stamping her foot down, she trekked towards a bigger tree with the intention of climbing it to see if there was an area farther off without snow. She knew it was hopeless, but still climbed.

Halfway up, she fell and tangled her neck in her own scarf, hanging herself from a large tree branch. Choking, she sought to free her neck, but only managed to get it tighter. She felt her throat crushing in and felt surprisingly real pain, but knew there could be no way she would die.

Because she was already dead.

Maybe a half an hour later, as her vision faded from black to white and back again, she saw the shape of a man making slow progress towards her in the snow. A few feet away from her, he fell just at her dangling feet, taking choked shallow breaths. He rose up slowly, his hand around his throat, which seemed to be constricting all by itself.

"Flowergirl." He rasped, and suddenly she realized the hands reaching for her were Sephiroth's. She swung away from him with her legs, feeling the scarf tighten around her neck. She didn't care. When he reached for her again with a clearly labored effort, she swung herself away again until he was trying his damnedest to catch her swinging body. She was scared, and knew this was infinitely better than anything he would probably do to her. She heard him curse her on another failed effort and when he finally caught her legs, he ripped her down from the tree and tossed her down into the snow.

She rolled to her feet and ran the other way, fingers working at the scarf that was still choking her even without the body weight. Throwing her scarf aside she ran through the snow, hair flying out behind her, boots filling fast. But he was faster and she felt something yank her back by her hair and throw her back into the snow.

When her head hit, everything went black before she was looking up at the silver general, who was looking down on her, eyes a bright, roiling green.

He stood there in his coat and armor, a sharp figure cutting into the snowfall. His one dark wing furled and unfurled over and over again, but his sword was strangely not present.

"Suicide seems very out of character for you." He said simply, breathing normally now. She caught her breath, looked in his eyes. She was at a loss for words, rather terrified, and more than just a little uncomfortable.

"I just want to be left alone." She said, and was embarrassed by the tremor in her voice. She put a hand to the wound in her abdomen, the one he'd given her. It was beginning to hurt. He nodded.

"I surprisingly, want the very same thing."

"Then why are you here?" she asked, flinched when he knelt down. He took her neck into one of his hands and looked at her intently.

"For whatever reason, we are connected." He said and suddenly tightened his hand, crushing her throat in his fingers. She could only dig her nails into the snow. She noticed that he also began to choke. He took his hand away. She rubbed at the skin there. "It's what I thought." He said quietly.

"Everything that happens to me—" her eyes widened.

"And vice versa." He touched his mouth and she touched hers, remembered when Zack had punched him. She assumed it was something that was, so that Zack couldn't do any further harm to the General. She had a feeling that wasn't it anymore.

Her stomach hurt.

"When does it stop?" she whispered, getting up. "When?" she said again, throwing up her arms. Sephiroth knocked her back into the snow, and was on top of her before she could move.

"I assumed it would stop with death." He got her down before she could move, anchored her down with his weight. The snow came down to a flurry, and the sun started to poke through the haze, but the night forced it back down. The dead weren't agreeing anymore. She pushed against his chest, and it felt like cold, dead flesh. She hit him, hit him again. "Below us, people live on an insignificant planet, they go about their lives, believing the lies of others." He opened her coat. "I have believed the lies of others for so long, I have often longed for the finality of death." He opened the first few buttons of her dress. "This place, it isn't-anything like it's supposed to be." He said quietly.

She was surprised to find there was no invisible hand to sweep his away. He laid a hand on her chest. "This heartbeat flowergirl," he closed his eyes as if in pain, "is also a lie." She watched his fingers sink into her chest, scrape and break past bone. She screamed. She could feel her heart beating in his hand.

His teeth were bloody when he bared them against the pain he no doubt felt in his own chest. "I never do anything halfway." He said, and she tried to pull his arm away. "You're going to die with me."

"There's...nothing after this Sephiroth..." she sputtered.

"I hope that you are right." He said, and it occurred to her that maybe there wouldn't be. She didn't actually know, and neither did he. She let go of his arm, and bit her lip and he squeezed. The snow around them was spotted with red. For a moment she wondered if real non-existence was simpler, if it was good. She stopped struggling.

She was warm at least. Sephiroth stopped and looked at her. Forever passed before he looked away. His hand unclenched, and when he took it out he wiped the blood on his leg. He got up.

He walked off into the white, and some minutes later the sun rose.

The day was one of the more confused ones she'd seen in couple months, and lying among a golden pile of leaves she finally did her buttons back up as she saw Zack approaching. He had his winter coat still intact, and she remembered that he was after all from the south.

It began to rain then, and it felt like she'd always imagined summer rain would feel. She took her jacket off and it faded fast enough for Zack not to see how bloody it was.

"Something's a little haywire around here." He said, lifting her to her feet. "Did you sleep alright?" he asked, and she looked at him, was surprised by the instant laughter roiling in her chest.

"It'll take some getting used to." She said avoiding his eyes, feeling her laughter leave her. She was ashamed to think that hours before she had been so selfish as to even entertain the idea of leaving this place. Still, she'd never once thought of transcendence. It wasn't as if her life was terrible in the lifestream, up until the present it had been...as good as it could be.

"I'm hungry." Zack said, taking her hand and leading her into the town nearby, a massive tangle of brick, steel and glass no one really bothered with anymore. They had all tried to manufacture places like towns and cities they had known in their living states, but mostly there was just a lot of confusion. And she knew somehow this was a deliberate construct of the powers that presided over all of them.

She knew the same powers that kept sweeping Zack's hands away, kept her from walking into any man's house, had damned their cities and towns from the very beginning. The people you knew alive where the people you knew in death, and none of their wishes could change that. Yes, it prevented a lot of would be conflict, and stopped any confusion among memories, but Aeris ached for more, just as she had when she had been living.

But the reality was that for all of them, they could only have or know the things and people they had memories of in life. She was less likely to meet a soul from Costal del Sol than Zack was to eat a fancy dish he'd only heard of but never had.

Everything they had was based in memory. She wondered if Zack's Sephiroth was that much more different than hers. She wondered how drastically different the man would be if it was Zack he met in the snow, if he'd be conflicted, and rearing different faces in the presence of both of them.

She suspected it could happen, but didn't think too long on why too often people who changed from one thing to another in life weren't allowed to interact with more than one person at a time. Thinking about the small details always made her a little anxious.

She and Zack ate at a café they'd been to once on a date—probably the third one, she couldn't remember—and he scraped his food up, mmming and awing. She didn't have the heart to ask if she was the only one who couldn't taste anything. Those memories were the ones to go the fastest.

They weren't ever _really_ hungry, but the motions were something nice to do. If she closed her eyes, she could almost taste the sweetness of the blueberries in her pancakes. Almost.

Later after Zack went to go visit his grandmother, she sat by herself. She didn't know what she longed for, if she longed at all, but knew there was something to be done. She closed her eyes, imagined the hands around her heart, the silver of his sword and hair. All around her the table and chairs quivered until she was standing in a white place, full of glass, examining tables and tile. The labs. Something they both knew. Sephiroth appeared, stared dumbly at her and his surroundings before reaching for a sword that wasn't there.

Absurdly, she still had her plate of pancakes. She threw it in a bin nearby. Sephiroth scowled.

"Is there something you need?" he said, breath shuttering. The labs were not a happy place for either of them. She balled her fist at her side.

"My house." She said. "I want it back."

"What?"

"Ever since you came here, my life—"

"Your _life?_" he curled his lip and looked away. "I can tell you with certainty, that your life ended a while ago."

"Yes, on your sword." She said, and it sounded a lot more bitter than she hoped it would.

"That is obviously why I can tell you with _certainty_."

"You're...not even sorry?" she said, eyebrows knitting together. Sephiroth was silent a while, massive black wing curling by his side.

"I agree that it was unfortunate." He said, "and yet even when I was a sane man, most knew to stay out of my way. You, were in my way." He said, and she couldn't even speak.

"Zack..." when she said his name, something very bare and alien seemed to pass Sephiroth's eyes. "He told me that you were good man once." Sephiroth narrowed his eyes then, coming back more to the man she knew.

"Men change." He said, folding his arms. "Being as young as you are, I wouldn't expect-"

"I never got to be young, Sephiroth. Not really." She folded her arms too, looking around them. "You should know what that's like." She said and he looked her up and down, his wing still. A long silence passed between them.

"You were going to let me do it." He said, watching her. The realization made her skin go colder than it already was. She didn't know if he was talking about the night before in the snow, or the last moments of her life, before she felt his sword pierce her back. "You are just a perfect little martyr, aren't you?"

Her eyebrows furrowed at his words. Martyr. She hadn't set out to do that, to_ be_ that. But she had only known what needed to be done, and that was it. It looked noble, that her purpose had become so significant so quickly still made her stop and wonder, but she'd never actually wanted things the end that way, no matter how beautiful the planet was. She hated the presumption in his eyes, that she was this perfect thing, preening under her own purity and sacrifice.

There wasn't a day that passed by when she didn't think about what she would never have, Barrett's deep laughter, Cid's reluctant hugs that smelled like cigarettes, Tifa's silken hair and bright smiles, and Cloud's soft, uncertain kisses.

Sephiroth-he didn't know anything. And she just for once, wished for the same ignorance.

"No." she said, looking into his face. "I'm not."

"Then what are you?" he asked, coming forward and filling the dark hollows around his eyes with light. What are you? He asked, and she was struck by the distinct impression that he should be asking the question of himself. That _Gaia_, they were so _alike_ because-

"I don't know." She said. "I never...figured it out."

-because they both were kind of nameless in the worlds they lived in, exceptions, strange things without definitions except for the drastic things they had done to just _be._ She was that martyr who grew flowers, and he was a silver demon who slayed in and out of war.

She thought about her refrigerator. She would never be normal, not even in death. _They_ would never be normal.

Suddenly she felt something wet spreading through the middle of her dress. Looking down, she could see that the old wound was bleeding. She fell to her knees, and clenching a hand to her stomach, she looked on as his wing caught fire, and was torn from the bone, muscle and skin of his back with such force he could lean his weight into the off current, hair sweeping up along with feathers full of flesh.

She reached for him even as her gut was wrenching and the surroundings were suddenly changing, spinning and filling with colour and smell. She was alone then, in the grassy place her house used to be.

"You look good with your hair like that." Zack's voice said from out of the tall grass. She walked blindly in the night until he pulled her down with him. She could see his eyes, and they had no traces of green. She put her fingers through it, realized her braid had come out.

"Really?" she said, as he kissed her temple.

"Yeah." He said quietly, rolling onto his back to look up into the sky. Starless. "Is your house ever gonna come back?"

Aeris flipped onto her back too and considered the bottomless sky. "I don't know." She said. But honestly, she didn't think it ever would. Somehow she knew this. Somehow, it didn't really matter. Playing pretend didn't have the same seduction, and she thought for a moment of Sephiroth's hands around her beating heart.

Zack was breathing very slowly, the cadence of it was something she felt she'd dreamt about once.

"I fuckin' hate this place sometimes." He whispered again, and she couldn't see his face, but his voice, it was just as deep, so faintly harkening of sun and swamps, it felt like a loop she'd heard before. She picked a flower by her hip, and it withered in her hand.

Beside her, Zack began to melt into the grass. She ached inside and grabbed the dog tag which still hung around his neck. It was enough to stall his departure, and he looked up at her, body already half into the earth.

"You have a lot of wishes..." he said, and she bit her lip.

"No, I...I really only have one."

"And what's that?" he asked and she opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. And he was gone. She knew the chance to tell him was long gone.

The next time she saw Sephiroth a spring rain was falling, and she felt that she had been the one to be called. All around her the scene began to shift, floorboards slid into place under her feet, walls rose around them and so did the flowers bloom.

"My church." She said, wiping the rain from her face. Sephiroth wrung his hair out in the center aisle. "You can't possibly know this place too." She said, turning a questioning eye.

"I don't." he said, and she knew it was true for farther off she could see that the doors to the church as well as the back half were missing. In their places, were cherry blossom trees, bloody fields and bodies.

It seemed that even the things that unconsciously sprouted up around them were beginning to become broken, confused. She felt prickles on her arms for what she knew was never supposed to happen in the lifestream. She was privy to his memories, she could see them and he could see hers.

Despite him never having been in her church and her never having been to-to-

"Wutai." He said, turning towards his part of the scape. She drew in a breath when she saw he no longer had a wing.

"Wutai." She said, liking the way the word felt, tasted. She hadn't been many places, and it was a tantalizing thing, even as bodies lay in the landscape, dead. She knew about his campaign there, everyone did. The news had been abuzz, the world had been intoxicated with this young General.

He was silent, breathing with his back turned to her.

"It's beautiful." She said, looking at the trees. She was intoxicated on the idea, and when he spun around to face her she knew he was sick with the reality, or whatever the picture was that lay before him.

"How?" He said, looking so natural against the backdrop. "There is nothing beautiful to be found here, and if there ever was-" he left off. "I read the papers. All written by people like you, so willing to embrace only the ideal," he came forward took her face into his hands. She didn't see any reason to stop him. "If I were to draw parallels between you and I, would you find your own romance in it? Or would you realize, that just like you I am uncertain, and could crush you to dust just as soon as I could touch you?"

"Touch me?"

"Yes. Exactly like this." He said. "When I touch you like this, what do you think? It's almost as if...I care for you." He didn't seem to be saying it to be cruel, but just to state the facts. "You would believe it too, even though right now I could just be contemplating how to break your neck." She looked up at him, and his hold stayed gentle, cold. His jaw clenched. "People believe what they want to believe, they make their own constructs despite what may actually lay in front of them. That's the reason I am what I am, you are what you are, and this place is...like it is." His face fell into shadow.

His words were the explanation to the feeling in her gut when Zack pressed his cheek against hers, the first time the taste of food didn't linger long enough in her mouth to taste it, when her house burned down around her. It was paltry imitation. It wasn't...enough.

And it wasn't real.

"I..."

"Are you going to deny it?" He asked. She grabbed onto his coat, which had at some point turned into a black, standard uniform. Her dress had changed too, one she hadn't worn in years.

"Tell me that you aren't just a memory." She had handfuls of his uniform. "Tell me." She pleaded. He grasped her head between his hands then, made her look up at him.

"I will..._never_ be a memory."

And it rang so true, she couldn't deny anything anymore. It seemed their wounds had healed, her stomach had knit itself together, his back was a smooth expanse of muscle she glimpsed as their clothes were ripped away from them, and they suddenly stood naked in her church.

Sephiroth was just as he always was, and stood before her unbothered, pale and very tightly put together. Putting her arms around her more yielding frame, she suddenly understood. The lifestream was separating them from it. She knew the proof in the house that wouldn't rise, the memories she could no longer call back. With sadness, she tried to recall Zack lying in the grass.

"We're going to live." He said, and she shook her head.

"No, we're going to die." She said smiling. They were both regressing, her old wounds opening up, his wing removing itself, their old clothes. They were moving backwards, and she knew it wasn't going to stop until they were gone, for good and completely. It was what they both had wanted, right?

Sephiroth's jacket lay in the dust as Wutai and her church disintegrated around them. He picked it up and tried to offer it to her, but it was dust too, and she didn't really want it anyway. She wanted him to look at her, see everything as no man ever had.

She wanted him to touch everyplace that had for too long gone untouched.

In the middle of nowhere the invisible hand let up, and she gave it all to him. And when they fell asleep, they fell asleep as children, and awoke as nothing at all.

Author's Note: So, this kind of got away from me. That might be a bit of an understatement considering this was just supposed to be a short in which Sephiroth and Aeris met in the lifestream and had awkward conversation over tea about him killing her. But I guess this works too? I love these two. That is all. Love to know what you guys think.


End file.
